Who is he? New York's next governor, for one, and probably a lot more than that. But what, exactly, will this man become? We asked around.

On July 16, 1984, the little-known first-term governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, ascended the dais at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco and delivered one of those keynote addresses that immediately had people talking about him running for president. Ethnic guy with a funny name who can make you cry with a speech. The proto-Obama. Except, in an enduring mystery, Cuomo never ran. On the eve of the filing deadline in New Hampshire in December 1991, with a plane idling on the tarmac in Albany, waiting to fly him to the Democratic nomination for president, Cuomo left the plane sitting. He said he had to get the state budget done, as if that had ever stopped anybody from doing anything. Bill Clinton is still scratching his head over that one.

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Mario's son Andrew was in his early twenties when his father first ran for governor, and he would manage all the campaigns except for the one his father finally lost in 1994. Andrew wasn't around for that one because he had by then made a name for himself in the area of housing for the poor, having with his sister Maria started the nonprofit housing organization HELP in the mid-1980s, and would soon find himself in the Clinton Cabinet as secretary of housing and urban development.

In the wake of a disastrous run of New York governors (Eliot Spitzer, David Paterson), Andrew Cuomo, who is now New York attorney general, is this year the odds-on favorite to ascend to the office that his father occupied for twelve years. And once he's in the governor's mansion, most everybody in Albany (and a few in Washington, too) expects that he won't leave that plane idling on the tarmac.

Americans claim not to love political dynasties, yet we keep doing them somehow. And while it is certainly premature to start using that word with the Cuomos, the symmetry of Mario and Andrew — and the notion that yet another son might seek to finish what his father started — makes for a captivating story, to say the least.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Because the operative question is, just who is Andrew Cuomo? We asked a few people, including Cuomo himself. Here, an oral history.

You have to promise me that this will be about Andrew and not me. Okay?

I was a relatively young governor with Tim Russert as my chief of staff. After leaving [Senator Daniel] Moynihan, he came to me. And I had Andrew — that's all I had.

Andrew was my dollar-a-year man. He got abused by the press terribly.

I said, You're breaking your back. You're smart, honest, and tough. Get out of here, go make some money. I'll do what I can here.

Chris Cuomo, Andrew's brother, journalist, ABC News:

Andrew is a mechanical genius. We've built several cars together. They're seventies muscle cars. He has a 1975 Corvette that he fixed in college and a 1968 GTO. We have a 1969 Firebird. It wouldn't mean anything to other people, but the collection means everything to us.

We'd always wanted to get an El Camino. They're half pickup, half car, very cool. We found one on eBay. We'd fixed it up, it was running. Andrew and I were in it, he was driving, and he said, "I'm gonna show you how a real man shifts gears." And he blew the engine. I just found out how a real man blows the engine.

We're American-car guys. In fact, I just got my first new car. Andrew took that as a betrayal. If Andrew gets a car, it's about making the car. It's really a metaphor for what he does in government. He does it himself, he fixes things.

I wish he would have more fun. I wish Andrew would work in the private sector and make a lot of money, because he could. He could have an easier life, but he doesn't want to. He wants this life.

Jimmy Breslin, journalist:

It wasn't a money neighborhood, where they came from: Hollis, Queens. I come from around there. His father was involved in the housing fight in Forest Hills. His father was smart, but he's smart, too. Not like these guys who come out of Old Greenwich, Connecticut, and think they know everything but don't.

Andrew Cuomo:

My father practiced law in Brooklyn. We lived in Queens. He was a community, sort of public-interest lawyer. He practiced law, but he got more and more involved in these community issues. He was great friends with Jimmy Breslin, who lived in Forest Hills, Queens. Jack Newfield, Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill were the journalists who would expose the injustice. My father was the lawyer who would bring the case. I remember them from the time I was like eleven, twelve.

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My father would answer the phone with that Queens tough-guy voice: Yup, yup. So I would answer the phone "Yup." And Breslin would be on the other end, and I would say "Yup" and he would just start [does Breslin growl]: "That SOB Lindsay, motherfucker, this effin' bastard," and he would go on and on, and like four minutes later I would say, "Oh, Mr. Breslin, you must want my father... ."

"You little fucker!" he'd say. Click.

George Haggerty, who worked with Cuomo at the Haggerty-family gas station for three years in high school:

Andrew is probably the only Cabinet member who could advise the president on housing issues and replace the camshaft on a 1971 Chevelle SS. We pumped gas and helped the mechanics at my father's B&G service station in Hollis, Queens, for about three years. For a teenage boy, it was nirvana.

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You know, my father just passed away. And I didn't call Andrew and tell him because I know he's so incredibly busy. But at my father's funeral, as I was going down the aisle of the church as a pallbearer, I see that Andrew is sitting there in one of the pews, alone.

He spent a long time afterward with my mother, telling her how much he respected my father. It meant a lot to her.

My dad always said a man's character is determined by the way he acts when no one's watching, when he's got nothing to gain. Is he charitable just when people see him being generous_ or is that his nature to help even when he won't receive the attention of others? Andrew came to the funeral by himself. He took the morning off as attorney general. He came, he prayed in church for my father's soul.

Ed Koch, former New York City mayor:

The signs said, VOTE FOR CUOMO, NOT THE HOMO. Andrew says he didn't do it, and I believe him. Mario says he thinks he now knows who did it. I was very angry at the time. Primary races always end in anger. They're different than the general election: They're like a civil war — it's brother against brother. But I've forgiven them. I'm eighty-five now, and grudges take your energy away. I've forgiven them all.

George Arzt, longtime political strategist, reporter, and former press secretary for Ed Koch:

I'm one of the Koch people, and when the VOTE FOR CUOMO, NOT THE HOMO signs went up — don't forget, it was 1977, and Andrew was very young. I don't credit Andrew with it, and Koch doesn't either.

Later I was a reporter in Room 9 [the pressroom at City Hall]. I was working for the Post, and Mario called and yelled at me a few times. Andrew always came to console me. I wrote a story about Mario's father-in-law and back taxes, and he called me and, among other things, said, "The sewer runs right to your desk." Andrew showed up a while later and said, "I heard about the phone call. Calm down. Everything will be all right."

I was in New York working for District Council 37 [the public-employees union] in 1982, and I got assigned by the political arm to work on Mario's campaign for governor. The public employees disliked Koch, but Mario still seemed to have no chance of winning. I had zero political experience and was naive enough not to understand the forces that were arrayed against us. Koch was ahead by so many points. He had virtually been anointed by the New York Post. We were being marched to the slaughter, basically.

It was a relatively small group of people working on Mario's campaign at that point. Andrew was in charge of the group, and we were both the same age, about twenty-two, twenty-three. Andrew was given an impossible task. He had to court the biggest names in business, politics, and the labor bosses. He was the person tasked with keeping it all together. He had to gain the trust and respect of all those leaders in New York. I'm sure there were missteps along the way.

During the campaign, our small group worked way over on West Thirty-ninth Street. It was a huge, semi-abandoned warehouse space we had turned into "campaign headquarters." It was tough to keep morale up.

It was an assortment of people Andrew knew. There were his friends from Queens, random volunteers, and a couple of people like me sent in from the outside. And there was one young man from the neighborhood who came in every day, who was developmentally disabled. He was in his late teens. Peter, nice kid. He came in after school faithfully to help out. Peter would do things like get the literature out of boxes, stuff envelopes, the millions of things you have to do in a campaign operation. A few of the tough kids from his neighborhood in South Jamaica, they would occasionally give him a hard time. They would make fun of him in some way that they thought would go over his head, but you could tell it didn't and that he was hurt by it.

One day Andrew called a campaign staff meeting. The dozen of us trudged into the office, and he started casually going through the agenda. He said there were some new organizational duties for people. This seemed funny because it was the same twelve people doing everything all the time.

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But Andrew then made a very big announcement that he was appointing Peter deputy volunteer coordinator. He looked at the group and said, You folks are going to work with him on that. For this kid, it was the shining moment of his life, that Andrew had singled him out. Andrew didn't berate anybody. But he was sending the message that he knew what was going on and he wanted everyone to treat this young man with respect.

You've heard the stories about him being a tough guy. But at the same time, this showed his moral compass. I thought it was unusual for a person of his age.

Mario Cuomo:

I became governor by accident in 1982. Hugh Carey decided not to run again. A number of candidates arose: Stanley Fink, speaker of the assembly, from Brooklyn, who was brilliant, funny, strong, and honest. Another was Carol Bellamy. There was Bob Abrams. All of these people had been around politics much longer than I had. Ken Auletta in the Daily News said I had everything it takes to be a good professor and a good lawyer but none of what it takes to be a good politician. I had no chance to win at all. I had never won an election before.

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Carey had picked me for lieutenant governor, but I had never really proven myself to be a strong candidate for office.

People were asking me, Are you gonna run?

All of a sudden, Rupert [Murdoch] took Koch on a trip to London. And he talked Koch into running for governor. The Post and Rupert said they would back Koch. Then The Times said they were going to back Koch.

All the candidates dropped out. Ed called me up and said, Look, you're a great guy. I beat you in the mayor's race. You're not cut out for this. He compliments me, then he says, Why don't you just drop out and help me run my campaign, and then help me run the place?

Regrettably, he did a Penthouse article.

When asked about his ideas for what he would do as governor, he said, You know, there are no Chinese restaurants in Albany. It's a bunch of hillbillies up there. He said these insulting things in jest. Yet they became a big issue.

Before that, Andrew had said, You can't win this thing, Dad. Maybe it's time to fold. You can't win.

Andrew Cuomo:

Let me show you. Come over here. This is a 1968 GTO. It's a convertible. This is a collector's item. This is a '75 Corvette. It's all redone. I have just those two. No one else is allowed to drive them. Some things for us dudes are just ours. I drive them a little bit. The GTO — they are what you call drivers. They're not so perfect that they're what you call show cars. There are people who will rebuild a car and just show the car. They don't drive the car. That's not these cars. I use these cars. The GTO, I use with the kids. The Corvette I've had since college and it's of sentimental value. I bought it and it needed a ton of work — about $5,000 worth. The Corvette has only two seats, so I can't drive the kids. The GTO I use, but the kids don't like it. They get embarrassed when I show up in the GTO. Because it's different. Different looking and different sounding.

Christopher just redid a '69 Pontiac Firebird, which is like the '68 GTO. They're all the same genre, those cars. Late sixties, American cars. Those were the cars I grew up with, the cars that you liked that you couldn't afford. The aspirational cars.

I truly like taking apart the engine and putting it back together. It's a hobby for me now. Sort of my therapy, you know?

The El Camino was Christopher's fault.

Chris Cuomo:

He blew the engine. I don't know how the hell that's my fault.

Dan Klores, filmmaker:

I first met Andrew when I was editor of Avenue magazine and I assigned a story on Mario Cuomo's chief fundraiser, Lucille Falcone. She was his secret weapon in the primary. This was 1985.

I get a call one day from two guys I went to high school with. I hadn't spoken to them in almost twenty years. I hadn't even thought of them. I maybe said nine words to them the entire time in high school. One was a guy named Bob Miller, and it turns out that at that time, he was Andrew Cuomo's law partner. And that was Andrew going to work. He'd obviously said, Find out who knows this guy Dan Klores. Anyway, it was a positive story.

So Andrew called me and said why don't you go for a ride with me. He knew I was from Brooklyn, and he drove like a maniac out to East New York to show me what he had been doing. And what he had been doing left this indelible print in my mind. He had built this housing complex of two-story buildings with gardens and playgrounds for people who used to be homeless through his organization, called HELP. It was one of the most impressive places I've ever seen. This was a completely different side of the guy who was trying to manage a story on Mario's fundraiser.

A place for these mothers and children who used to be homeless that provided not only safety and comfort but also hope. He'd dealt with everything himself — the design, the contracting, the construction. But then after the people moved in, he dealt with their alcoholism and drug addiction and history of abuse. And some communities, like in Suffolk County, fought him left and right.

Some people say, Oh, it was easy for him, he was the governor's son. How many governors' sons or daughters do all this?

He loves to be in the kitchen on Sundays. His new thing is sauce. Since he has his daughters half the time, on Sunday he makes a huge potful of homemade spaghetti sauce from scratch. He cooks all the sausage nice and crispy, and then he makes his sauce, and he puts it in the fridge for Wednesday night when the girls come. He thinks it tastes better after a few days.

Clarence Day, former New York City homicide detective, head of Cuomo's security detail at HUD:

I'm a retired police officer. I went to HUD in 1959. I worked for five secretaries, both Democrats and Republicans. None of them are as steady as Mr. Cuomo. From the moment I met him, I knew he was a nice fella. We went to all fifty states together. We'd stay in hotels, and I usually took the room across from him to see what was going on through the peephole. Early in our relationship as secretary and security man, he said to me, "I don't ever want to be alone in a room with a female." That was very, very, very interesting to me. We were getting ready to go somewhere, and his door was wide open. I could see him sitting in there. I knew what it was: He was talking to a staff member and it was a female, so he kept the door wide open.

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I remember one time we went up to New York for a speech or something, and he said, I want you to see something. And he took me and the driver to some housing that he had built. And I had seen public housing all over this country, but his place was clean and nice. What it should be. And he said, People need this. This is what my goal is in cities. And he looked straight at me and said, "What do you think?" It was surprising to me. What do I think? It was surprising that he asked me what I think.

Ed Koch:

I didn't support him for attorney general at first, and he called me. I told him, Andrew, there are two reasons I'm not endorsing you. The first is those terrible things you said about your wife [during his divorce from Kerry Kennedy], which I thought were awful.

The second is that when you withdrew from the governor's race in 2002, you destroyed the Liberal party by taking away fifty thousand votes from the Liberal party. He told me, I did not say anything bad about my wife, but my friends did, and with respect to the Liberal party, I was wrong, and I've since apologized to [former Liberal party head] Ray Harding. So I endorsed him.

I think he's been exceedingly good as attorney general. I saw him at the last Alfred E. Smith dinner, and I said, You're doing a terrific job, and also a great job of staying out of the TV lights. Whatever advice your father's been giving you is good advice. And he said, "It's my mother's advice." I think he's absolutely matured. He's doing a splendid job, and I support him for governor.

Chris Cuomo:

Andrew has a boat, the same one he's had for years. Unfortunately, he can't catch fish. The gold standard is striped bass. I don't know if Andrew has ever even seen a striped bass. His inability to catch fish, I think, speaks to his humanity. He loves life too much. He doesn't want to take it away, even from a fish. He might as well try to catch it with his hands.

Dan Klores:

One time we went hunting. It was Andrew, me, [Mike] McAlary [the late Pulitzer-prize-winning columnist], and Kenny Moran — the New York Post actually had a hunting-and-fishing columnist then and Moran was it. We went in the middle of the winter and stayed in this hunting cabin, and it was freezing. But we spent all day shooting these clay pigeons, and Andrew was unbelievable — he was getting them all. So the next day we went for the birds. He was like Alex Rodriguez with a gun. He got like nineteen birds. Moran couldn't touch Andrew. He said, This is unbelievable. Did you ever go hunting before? And Andrew said never. So when we got back to the city, I told my friend Bob Miller about it. I said, It's amazing, he never went hunting before. And Miller said, What are you talking about? He goes hunting every weekend.

Alice McAlary Tully, widow of Mike McAlary, who died of colon cancer on Christmas Day, 1998, at age forty-one:

Andrew and Michael were very close. They were born a few days apart and always had big birthday bashes together [at Maguire's, the old newspaperman's gin mill in midtown Manhattan]. Also with Dan [Klores].

When Michael was in the hospital, Andrew came and gave him a plaque. On it was a picture of President Clinton, Vice-President Al Gore, and himself. He'd gotten both Clinton and Gore to write letters to Michael. They didn't say get well or anything, because Michael was too sick. President Clinton wrote that he and Hillary always read his columns. Gore wrote something nice, too, and then Andrew wrote: "I had nothing to do with this."

I love it, actually. I put it over Quinn's crib, because he was the only one of our four children who never really knew his father. He was only a baby, only a year old at the time. I kept it over his crib, and now it's over his bed. It's good for him to know that the president and the vice-president took the time to do that. That Michael was important enough to get that. It was nice of Andrew to do.

Michelle Minton, resident of Buffalo:

I was home with my kids when I got a very nasty phone call about a debt I was pretty sure I didn't owe. He said, "Hi, Michelle," like he knew me, then he turned very nasty.

I'm not a stupid person — I know not to give out my bank information. He had me on the phone for forty-five minutes. He said, You owe $4,500. You only have to give $900, but we have to have an electronic payment right away. He said they were going to put me in jail. He said the judgment was already filed, and he had people with a warrant for my arrest. He told me that if I didn't pay, the police would come and arrest me in front of my children.

My daughter has been diagnosed with autism. She's two; my son is three. I'm crying on the phone. It was horrible. I just wanted to get him off the phone, so I gave him my bank information. He wore me down. They took money out of my account.

As soon as I gave him the information, I called the bank. They wouldn't help me. I called legal aid. They said call the attorney general's office. I said, Why? I had no idea what the attorney general's office did.

The bank was much nicer when I had the attorney general behind me. Cuomo took the guys to court.

Benjamin Lawsky, deputy counselor and special assistant to the attorney general:

When we launched our investigation into banker bonuses, Andrew got calls from some master-of-the-universe types who basically said, "If you do this, you're going to lose a lot of friends on Wall Street." Andrew explained that he wasn't against bonuses on principle, but when you take billions in taxpayer dollars, you're accountable to the public. He wanted to know how firms that had lost billions and then been bailed out by taxpayers could justify paying performance bonuses. We went ahead with the investigation.

Mario Cuomo:

I've been asked about the Supreme Court and the presidency. Talking about this is more than I can bear almost. The difficulty with both things is that when you give the answer totally truthfully and simply, there is still disbelief. There is belief that there is some other sinister or unpleasant rationale in both cases. As for the so-called plane on the tarmac: I didn't ask them for a plane. I didn't tell them to get a plane.

There were suggestions that I had colon cancer, that I had no guts, that I had Mafia in my family. I was someone with a lot of vowels in his name. Phil Donahue put me on his show the next day and asked about the Mafia. He said, It must irritate you terribly to be asked about the Mafia. I said what is really irritating is that nobody said, "He has a twenty-four-year-old blond girlfriend."

The next day, one of my three daughters — I suspect it was Maria — said, Daddy just doesn't understand that some things have no plausibility.

Hank Sheinkopf, longtime New York political consultant:

If elected governor, the expectation level will be extremely high.

The expectation level for Spitzer was very high, and he couldn't meet it, so Spitzer destroyed himself.

Andrew Cuomo's not going to destroy himself. Andrew Cuomo wants to be president of the United States. Yes, an Italian American. Why not? It's about time.

Mario Cuomo:

All four of his grandparents came to this country as immigrants. Matilda's parents came from Sicily. My parents came from Salerno. Mine had no education in Italy or here. They came just in time for the Depression.

Andrew and his brother and sisters grew up with those four people. They learned a lot. They heard them called greaseballs, dagos, wops, and guineas. They were insulted over and over because they couldn't speak the language. And yet they were good, smart, and kind.

I never learned more than when I saw my father bleed from the bottom of his feet. He would be working for six days in a row in the grocery store. My mother would blot the bottoms of his feet. That's an education that shows itself in my kids.

Remember, you promised to make this about Andrew, not me. I know where you live, Molloy.